One Sky to the Next

Witness/participant, &quote;blase as a boulevardier/ in the spring Paris air,&quote; Buckley couples a lyric poet's urgency with a storyteller's feral patience: &quote;claptrap until my heart started doing double-takes-/ the bus driver with my retreating hairline, the mechanic/ with my beard and a little wound of ink or motor oil/ leaking from his breast pocket.&quote; These poems will take you, reader, from &quote;the edge/ of the cliff&quote; to &quote;the tideline&quote; and &quote;outside the Arlington Theater&quote; of a remembered matinee into a rumination on coyotes and stars. From One Sky to the Next-both in, and out of, this world-one of the strongest collections I've ever read-keeps pulling me back.-Roger Weingarten